Sorry, not totally following you here.

Are you talking about revenue neutrality for 1 and 2? That's irrelevant to the question of wasted time vs productive time. It's also irrelevant to knock-on effects (e.g., people traveling after rush hour who still encounter jams).

For point 3, if you're talking about a fuel tax, that doesn't maximize efficiency; load stays just as peaky. You need per-hour and per-route road pricing to shift demand to alternate times.

And regarding 4, allocating resources to economic need, you're talking like we aren't already spending billions on a highly complex system. It's just that the billions spent are in terms of lost economic productivity due to wasted time and fuel, rather than direct tax collected.

Not necessarily. For any change, there are short-term issues and long-term issues.

E.g., watch people complaining about how Apple is reversing the scrolling direction with the latest version of MacOS. Generally people grumble for a few minutes and then are perfectly fine with it. If you ask them at minute 3 whether it's a bad idea, they'll say yes. Ask them at week 3 and they'll say no.

He could just be saying that this is one of those things that people will be ok with when they get used to it.

That doesn't follow. That the Dutch ride more than almost any other country does not mean they're anywhere near the limit of the benefits that can be achieved by more ridership.

Four differences with a cash penalty for peak use:

1) The cash can be used for something else (e.g., road improvement), while time spent sitting in a jam is pure waste.
2) The penalty can be imposed directly upon the people actually driving in rush hour, without knock-on effects for others.
3) Pricing can be adjusted to maximize road flow. Traffic jams reduce throughput.
4) Cash biases use toward greatest economic need, rather than greatest willingness to waste time.

There's definitely a big difference, which is why I think the "any risk" standard you suggest is too extreme.

"Knowingly" is a good start. But there's a problem with that, too; it discourages knowing, or activities that lead to knowing, like investigation or research. A lot of the corporate criminals who caused the economic crash we're suffering from got away with it because they had plausible deniability. They just didn't know! And we happily ignored that they could have known, and probably should have known, and that they rigged things so that they wouldn't know.

We need corporate cultures that encourage investigation and honest reporting, but a standard of "knowingly" works against that.

That is an incredibly important point. You could fix the email problem, but you can't fix people refusing to know. Almost everybody responsible for crashing our economy escaped accountability, and many of them claimed that they were blameless because they didn't know what was going on, after setting up companies in such a way that they were guaranteed to not know what was going on.

It's an endemic problem in corporate America, and we need to find a way to fix it.

Not necessarily true. If you blindly make producers liable for all risk, and pile on top of that a substantial regulatory framework, you could create costs well above benefits.

I have a friend that makes jam. It's good jam. If she were to sell it at the farmer's market, people would happily buy it. And the sorts of people who buy jam at the farmer's market know what they're getting into. If by some fluke one of the jars doesn't seal properly, they'll deal with it. But in your world, she'd be exposing herself to substantial legal liability, plus the need to comply with a bureaucratic system that proves she has taken all possible steps to mitigate risk. Equipment, procedures, documentation, keeping up with regulations, filing reports. She wouldn't do that just to sell a few jars of jam.

For software, it's even worse. Regulating software creation uniformly is like regulating the creation of things made out of atoms: the variety is too wide to talk about it sensibly. The whole point of writing software is to do new things, which guarantees many risks won't be well understood. And software processes are moving to very fast cycles, where the goal isn't to completely prevent errors, it's to keep any impact very small. Regulation-induced ritual can wreck that.

Customers should generally be able to choose what level of risk they're accepting except where the risks are catastrophic and hard to understand (e.g., flying on a commercial airline). Without that freedom, we won't get small jam producers, we won't get companies that do bungee jumping or skydiving, and we won't get a great deal of the innovative software we now get.

That's the obvious solution to some, but it's not a terribly good one. If people were perfectly rational and had infinite thinking and observational capacity, your solution would work fine. But for the half-evolved monkeys that we are, it's much more efficient to solve some of the problems via non-market means. E.g., banning manufacture of pointlessly wasteful bulbs, or having government-run home retrofit programs.

Let me guess before I've read the article:

Larry Sanger, whose only claim to fame is a brief association with something that became impressive well after he left, is upset that people aren't deferring to him just because he has an official stamp of expertise in something other than the topic he is currently opining on.

Amen. Small-scale wrongness just requires some asshole. But ugliness in the large requires not just an asshole at the top, but a lot of compliant "just-doing-my-job" zombies at the bottom. We will never completely get rid of the assholes, but there's no reason to help them make the world worse. Even if it does come with a steady paycheck.

As if he'd use a script. I hear his plan is just to take prints of all his previous movies, blow them up with a lot of C4, and then take the frames that flutter down as the initial storyboards. Kind of like trusting to God, but Michael Bay believes only in Michael Bay.

Speaking of which, what is up with Linux sound? I'm just an OS consumer these days, so normally I don't bitch about Linux issues. But for years sound has been at best a bit wonky, and often entirely fucked. And that's on mainstream hardware.

I ask because it sounds like you know some of the story.

I wasn't around for it. But I'd say it's just another example of cargo cult programming.

It's much easier to say you're doing something, and maybe to observe some of the rituals, than to actually do the work. A lot of people working in OO languages don't even know what constitutes real OO. And I don't blame them; most intro Java books, for example, just give little snippets of procedural code with an occasional OO gloss.

You can see the same pattern happening today with Agile development. Some people get great results by deeply changing how they work. Others hear about it, adopt a fraction of it, and still see improvement. Then a lot of other people jump on the bandwagon, watering it down to the point where it's worthless, but in the meantime turning a big profit on certification, training, and consulting.

Amen, brother! I just got done with a round of hiring. I figured with the recession it would be easy. Not so! For 5 senior developer slots, we interviewed at least 20, did phone screens with circa 100, and got easily 500 resumes.

The number one reason we didn't hire people was because we didn't think they could code. Some were more scripters than real developers. Some had been ruined by too many years doing "enterprise" blah-blah; we wanted people to make stuff, not draw diagrams of best-practice pattern paradigms for proactive service-oriented synergies. Some just lacked the basics: a surprising number couldn't figure out the number of bits in an IP address, and two didn't know the number of bits in a byte.

The number two reason we said no to people was that they were risky, crazy, or broken. If I'm going to spend the next couple of years in a room with you working on something I care a lot about, I have to believe that a) you are not totally insane, b) you will not screw us over, and c) you are there to solve problems for our users. I don't think these are particularly high standards, but it seems like a surprisingly large fraction of people either left mom's basement too late or should never have left at all.

If people out there are having trouble getting hired, here's my tip: do practice interviews with friends or relatives who have hired before. Hopefully they can tell you the things that are invisible to you but are painfully obvious to people on my side of the table.

Heh. That's cute. You clearly have never been a leasing agent. Or a consumer salesman for anything that requires signing contracts. If you'd like to learn something, go on a vacation to someplace warm and sign up for a timeshare presentation. Even if you manage to hold on to your wallet, you will discover just how many people can be persuaded to agree to pretty much any idiocy.

Regarding leases, even if renters bother to read everything and try to understand it, which is pretty rare, they lack the experience necessary to see all the angles. The landlord, on the other hand, has plenty of experience. And by the time the renter realizes what a bad situation they have, their stuff is moved in, so moving is a giant hassle. So as long as the landlord can keep the perceived awfulness below the perceived costs of finding a new place and moving, they can get in quite a lot that the renter never expected up front.